soapbox

Y’all have been a huge help so far with the croquet project so here’s the update.

I’m going with 7/8″ dowels for the handles. They’ll get ordered this week and maybe even get here this week. I think though that it’s going to be two weekends before I’m ready to attach the handles and heads.

I also got the stain that I’m going to be using on the heads. I’m not ready to use it yet, but I have it.

I also soaked one of the broken bamboo pieces for about 5 days and the glue seams didn’t come apart, so I have no worries about its durability any more.

The block of wood that’s going to become the heads is almost ready too. At the moment it has the right width and height, but it’s 37″ long instead of being four 9″ pieces. I figured it would be easier to sand as a big block instead of smaller chunks. The grain is looking really nice though.

This is sanded up to 120 grit.

The future plan:
Next weekend: Sand some more, cut to length, glue on bamboo ends.
Two weekends from now: Attach handles, stain everything, start finishing.
Three weekends from now: finish finishing, get some balls
Start of September: We all put on dress whites and freak out the incoming first-years.

I just [almost completely] finished my bench over the weekend so I want to show off a little bit. Like all of the other furniture that I’ve built, it’s very heavy and could support a good fraction of the house if there was a significant collapse.

OOh, ahh. Ignore the staining on the wood that I didn’t take the time to sand all the way out. There’s going to be a cushion on it anyway.

No, the top isn’t curved, it just looks that way in the picture. Notice the cool green tones in the wood. (It’s Tulip wood.) You can also notice that all of the pieces of wood are a full two inches thick even after planing and sanding. Also, just to be cool, the top and legs were originally all one piece of wood. Last, the hole’s going to get covered up, don’t worry.

The bolt that you saw the head of before ends in this other hole. The entire part of the center board is to make sure that the legs don’t topple sideways. I’m not going to turn it on its side and jump on it, but it should be pretty sturdy. I put in half 1″ oak dowels just because I thought they’d spread the force a little bit and keep the washers on the bolts flat.

An interior view showing how the top is connected to the legs and center. When you look around you can find cool little thingies, and the “desk top connectors” definitely fit in the cool category. They’re slightly less than 1/4 inch thick steel, sunk slightly into center board and legs. There are 10 of them anchored into the bottom boards with 2″ screws and into the top with 1″ screws. Again, this thing won’t come apart easily.

Finally, I have a bunch of these bolt-hole covers to cover up all the holes. They’re decorative enough to be nice, but not so fancy that they won’t look good on the bench. I chose this rather than plugs so I can tighten up the bolts in the future if they need it. I need to let the poly dry for a week to get up to its final hardness and then put on a few coats of wax, so the covers will go on next weekend once I’m done.

Y’all need to read up on this praying mantis and her awesome “skillz of a predator”, to borrow a bit from Strong Bad.

All I gotta say is that I’m very happy the mantids are of a smallish nature, or else we’d be in serious trouble.